Friday, November 6, 2009

Week 11: Elizabeth Zimmerman Made Me Do It

For all I've been blogging about it, one would think I wasn't knitting at all. Au contraire, my dear readers.

First came the Mousie.



Knit out of small amounts of Blue Sky Alpacas Sport Weight and my all-time-favorite stash yarn, Lamb's Pride Worsted for a little instant gratification, my Mousie got me thinking about my other stash yarn and the joy of knitting something for oneself.

Not that I don't like knitting for other people, but sometimes it's discouraging to only knit what others will like rather than what makes *you* happy.

So I started daydreaming about Teva Durham's Lace Leaf Pullover, a sweater I've wanted to knit for eons. Since it came out in the Spring '05 issue of Interweave Knits, as a matter of fact. I'd bought the yarn and swatched it in April:



...but then my library classes started, and I had two summer sweaters going, and so I set it aside.

The pattern calls for a bulky, and my yarn is DK, so I'd have to do some fiddling with the gauge. I looked on Ravelry to see if anyone else had tried this. I never found out--I got sidetracked first by the neck. It looked wonky in just about every single one of the pictures. A dozen Ravelers can't be wrong, so it had to be the pattern. I could fiddle with that, too. So I pulled out The Opinionated Knitter and Knitting in the Old Way, decided to scrap the bottom-up-meets top down approach and do the whole thing in the round bottom up, and to scrap the raglan for a better-fitting round yoke...

And then I just cast on. Finals? Unfinished Thundercloud Cardigan? Another Christmas gift in the works that is most definitely going to need the same size 5 circular? The fact that I have only the gauge and the barest idea of how I am going to execute my sweater? I generally consider myself a practical person, but for this sweater, I threw practicality out the window. I have been inspired (possessed?) by the spirit of Elizabeth Zimmerman, and I'm going to go for it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love it! This is where knitting gets fun: taking off from an idea and making it your own.

A few years ago, I blogged the progress of a sweater I knitted with inspiration from Norsk Strikkedesign. Changed from pullover to cardigan, used different yarn and colors (of course: always do) and gauge, and so on.

Except in the summer, I wear that sweater almost every day.

Enjoy the journey. It's especially good to do this sort of thing when the rest of life is overcommitted, I think.

Wendolene said...

Thank you for your encouragement! So far, I'm really enjoying the adventure.